Red Herring
by Lewie
Summary: Deaths in a small Indiana town bring the team in. Can an old acquaintance of Stephen's be the key?
1. Default Chapter

"**_Red Herring" by Lewie_**

_**Henryville, Indiana**_

_**Population 1545**_

_**November**_

Jenny Pierson had her butt in the sand and her face on her bent knees.

She wanted to cry. She wanted her mommy.

Jenny was five years old and the sandbox was brand new. Daddy had built the frame and poured in a million tons of sand just yesterday and Jenny had been waiting for a week just to plop down in grainy sand and dig to someplace the grownups called China.

That's why she hadn't told anyone that she really didn't feel very well. In fact, she hadn't even wanted to crawl out of bed this morning, but she had been promised. Promised that she could play in the sand today for the very first time and Mommy didn't care how dirty she got because these were special play clothes. And only if the weather wasn't too cold, 'cause this was winter sorta and it had been cold already this year, but it wasn't cold today, not even cold enough to wear more than a sweater.

But this wasn't any fun. No fun at all.

She was shivering, her arms wrapped around her tiny body, her head hurt, it hurt so bad and she was hot and cold, hot and cold...

And then she didn't just want to cry any more, because she was crying, crying and rocking, with her arms around her knees and her body shaking so hard she thought she would fly apart and go to China that way instead of digging her way there. And then finally Mommy was there and picking her up and saying, "Jenny, what's wrong? Jenny? Oh my God, you're so hot!" and that was all she remembered or maybe it was all a dream.

'I'm late, I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date!"

She hated it when something got stuck on repeat in her head, especially when it's a particularly inane something. And oh boy, did this one fit that description.

Then on top of that, amid visions of watch fob bearing white rabbits running rampant through her mind, the water was screwed up again, so she had to suffer through a fast cold shower. It would have been fast anyway, but, damn, did it have to be cold! Breakfast was pretty a misnomer when applied to a piece of soggy toast, hastily slathered with grape jelly and lukewarm coffee.

But face it, Natalie, she reprimanded herself, you are 'Late, late, late, for a very important date!' Henryville, Indiana, seven afflicted, including a five year old girl who was the first to be diagnosed. It was never good when a child was involved; no matter what the disease or condition, it was the youngest who went first. She shook off the thought. If she let her mind wander to all the personalities, all the lives, she'd never be able to be effective in her job. And if she wasn't effective in her job, people died. It had nothing to do with a God complex. It was just her job. And she was good at it. They were all good at it.

One million deaths a year. That was the cost of malaria.

But not this way and not under these conditions. Malaria liked tropic or subtropic weather. The chance of cases of it showing up in one small, nearly isolated town in Indiana in the middle of winter with not one, single reported case of anyone even poking their nose into a foreign country was almost zero. Not to mention that malaria had been eradicated in the United States since the 1950's.

Add to that the fact that the spores were malformed, at least according to the reports they had received through their NIH contacts.

Besides, whoever heard of a mosquito in Indiana in the winter? Add to that the fact that these little nasties seemed to be resistant to the usual treatments and drug regimens. Not to mention that mosquito borne malaria, from all official reports, had not occurred this far north since 1972.

There was already one reported death: the five year old girl named Jenny Goldsmith.

As far as the local experts, and surprisingly there actually had been a local expert, knew little Jenny was patient zero. But the child hadn't been out of the country, hadn't been exposed to anyone who had been and at least according to her mother, hadn't been around any stagnant pools of water.

Natalie really, really hated it when a child was involved.

No time to dwell on that fact, though, which was probably a good thing. Holding up a (God, how much did that plane cost anyway?) plane because she'd overslept was not in her bio and this wasn't going to be the first time. One last look around the apartment and she grabbed her bag, coat and locked the door behind her.

She was almost at the door leading to the street before the manager caught her.

"Miss Durant!" His slight Irish brogue always made her smile for some reason. There was just such a pleasant lilt to it. "There's a package for you. It was just delivered. I was just on my way up to give it to you."

Absently, she took the small parcel, thanked him and kept walking, then had second thoughts as curiosity woke from its temporary stasis. Putting her bag down, she took a look at the envelope.

"From an admirer."

That was it. A plain, card stock square of paper taped to an ordinary business size envelope with those words typed on it.

Oh now, that was exciting, romantic, exotica little glimmer of George Clooney... no, too rough hewn... Harrison Ford? maybe... nope, Brad Pitt, definitely Brad Pitt. With a guilty glance at the big clock in the lobby... she still had time... she opened the envelope and a small silver charm spilled out into her hand.

Memory flooded in and Natalie sat down for just a moment in the nearest lobby chair, staring at the glittering charm in her hand. Who would have known? Her fingers twitched and almost ached with a longing she thought she'd put away long ago. She didn't even notice that she was smiling as she ran her fingers over the surface of the charm, tracing the outline of the grand piano and for just a second letting her mind drift back to much simpler times.

Even with three entire medical libraries on CD, there just never were enough texts that had been converted over. Which was why Miles figured he was going to have a hernia before he hit 25. At least this time he'd managed to cram everything into one bag which just might save him from Frank's 'you carrying the Library of Congress with you?' cracks. Maybe.

He smiled at that. Frank's friendly teasing gave him the nudge he needed when he was most feeling insecure about being in the company of the others. Miles had been labeled a Wunderkind before he'd gone through puberty and while other students thought that it gave him an edge over all the rest of them, it was a heavy burden to carry. People never seemed to remember that once labeled something like that, you had to spend the rest of your life living up to it. And medical school before you were shaving more than once a week... well, he never wanted to go there again!

It wasn't that he doubted his skills. Not doubt, really. Worry, all the time worry, that he didn't know enough, couldn't help enough. That was what kept him up at night when he finally crawled into bed. And the faces. He didn't understand how anyone remained detached after looking into the faces of the sick and dying and the people who loved them.

Like Connor. Connor preached detachment; he demanded it. He wasn't cruel in any sense, but he was convinced that emotional involvement of any kind cost the team their effectiveness. But then he'd seen Connor, caught in unguarded moments, betray almost vulnerability. Miles recognized it, because he felt that way almost all the time.

Okay, brain, shut up and let's get out the door.

He stepped on the envelope as he pushed his way out the door and would have missed it altogether if it hadn't scrunched out from under his foot. He almost kicked it aside as he turned to lock the door, but the flash of print on the front caught his eye, and instead, he set the bag down and picked up the scraped and wrinkled envelope.

"Miles"

Nothing else. No address, not even a last name. He looked around but the streets were virtually empty at this early hour, so he started to shove the envelope into his pocket and open it later, but curiosity got the better of him.

With a huff of impatience, he locked the door, glanced at his watch, then slid a finger under the seal of the envelope; it dropped from his hand. It took him a long moment to realize what he was looking at, to remember it, it had been so long since he'd seen it last. On his grandfather's vest, a glitter of gold chain, delicately woven and doubled on itself. His grandfather had been very proud of that watch fob and when the pocket watch that he used it with was broken, he stopped using it, putting it in a drawer where it vanished with the other detritus of his life. No one had seen it in years.

Breathing hard, Miles dropped to one knee and dug around in the ivy border until he found the torn white envelope. He pulled it open, turned it over, inside out. Nothing. Not a mark. Nothing but his name on the front.

No one could have had it. His grandfather had been dead for ten years. Even if he'd found it by accident, Miles' father wouldn't have bothered to send it to him, his father didn't bother much with Miles in any way, why that?

Eyes wide, he scanned the street, the small lane beside the house. Nothing. No one. Everyone was either in bed still or already at work.

Work. He had to get there before Connor sent a team of bloodhounds out after him. They were headed for somewhere in Indiana. A child had already died. He hated it when a child died; it seemed like such a cruel twist. He could try to figure out the watch chain later. Right now, he had a job to do and a plane to catch. Man, he hated planes.

Eva was ready bright and early. Too bright and way too early. She actually had to wait around after packing before it was late enough to call a cab, even after leaving everything in the apartment in order. Twice. Got a good night's sleep last night.

Unfortunately.

Another great night in Datelessville. What was it about her that seemed to make her destined to catch every rerun of Law and Order every night of the week?

Couldn't be the fact that she had to cancel more dates than she kept because there was nearly always a phone call at an inappropriate time saying, 'hop a plane, Eva, we're going to... insert name of latest germ ridden city or town... here', could it?

A guy could take that kind of excuse maybe once, possibly twice but the third time usually left the phone stuck on 'silent'. Somehow she doubted Stephen would particularly care that he was totally screwing up her social life. But it was starting to get kind of lonely at the top, or the middle or wherever the hell she was. Traipsing around after politicians had been better than this and it had been just East of Hell. No, okay, that wasn't true. This was good. When she looked in the mirror in the morning, there might not be dark circles under her eyes from late nights with up and coming young politicians or other notables and the latest social or party (in both senses of the word) circuit, but the clean, freshly scrubbed face staring back at her told her she was right where she was supposed to be.

Doing what she was meant to do.

Even if all she had to curl up with was press kits.

Connor could wrap himself up in his 'I can save the world singlehandedly' self assurance and the non-stop crush of trying to run the team, Frank had the warmth of his familyat least when he could steal a few moments with them when they weren't chasing down the disease d'jour, Nat could lock herself away in her lab which she was trying to do lately more often than not for some reason which Eva wanted to talk to her about but didn't know how to start, and Miles could curl up with one of those texts he was always lugging around, while tearing himself up from the inside out trying not to take on the pain of his patients, but Eva... well... life in the fast lane had been much more glamorous. She couldn't remember the last Congressman who had asked her to clean up a bedpan just because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But she had talents too. And the team used them. She could pick up a phone and "Make it So!" like no one else could. She could get them into and out of places they had no business being in in the first place. She had contacts with backing, money, supplies, access.

But the team... they were a team. And she was a part of them. A vital, valued part.

And that was what the face in the mirror in the morning was telling her, and she could live with that just fine. Even if the phone didn't ring. Even if she ate alone. Even if she became intimate with each and every episode of Law and Order.

She glanced up at the clock. Almost time to call the cab. Thank God. If she dusted another piece of furniture she was going to turn into Martha Stewart.

The doorbell rang and for just a second she had the disconcerting feeling that she had already called the cab and that was the driver, but she shook off the confusion and pulled the door open to a sleepy eyed delivery man.

"Morning, Ma'am," he said, almost on the verge of a yawn that he barely stifled, "flowers for a Miss Eva Rossi?"

Flowers? Hmmm, maybe her social life wasn't as pitiful as she thought it was, but then she caught sight of the 'delivery'. One little rose in a plain vase of water, not even any fern to dress it up, no ribbon, no bow, just that single red rose. A second look brought a smile to her face, though. The rose, even in all its solitariness, was perfect. Crimson, just bloomed, still strong with life and beauty.

"Yes, thank you," she murmured, taking the small offering, barely noticing when the man nodded and slouched his way back to his delivery truck. She didn't even notice the name of the company who had delivered.

Setting it down on the entryway table, she unpinned the card and opened it. Read it, then turned it over and looked for something on the other side. Huh. Nothing. Just her name on a generic florist's card, typed. Nothing even on the envelope, not even the name of the florist.

Another glance at the wall clock told her it was now time to call for the cab and she took a last look at the rose, knowing it would be dead when she returned, wishing she could take it with her.


	2. Red Herring, Part Two

1 

"Daddy! Are you going to bring back presents?" six year old (about to be seven!) Tescha asked/demanded with her tiny hands fisted at her hips. "It's my birthday and you're leaving, so you need to bring presents."

Frank laughed and went to one knee beside the indignant child. This was the one thing he hated about his job. The things he missed, the milestones of his kids' lives that just zipped on by without him and even though his idea of 'partying' didn't originally consist of donkeys with missing tails to attach, there was a tiny tearing sound only he could hear in his heart at missing each new one.

And if you'd stayed in the military? Or remained a cop? he reminded himself. Did he really think it would have been any different? At least this way, even though there was always the chance when they walked out the door that the plane might crash or the disease might skip right over all their precautions, no one was shooting at him. Not yet, anyway. Never rule out any possibility. He almost smiled at his own grim humor but Marcy was still waiting for her answer and big brown eyes in a pixie face could somehow be an amazing combination of demand and plea that he simply couldn't resist.

"I don't know, sweetie," he said honestly. He'd never lie to his kids. That had been one oath he'd made to himself; not like his own father. Frank Powell wouldn't always be able to give his children the answers they wanted, but they'd come to know that they could rely on the fact that he'd give them the truth. Always. Even when it hurt.

Amazing how indignant a six, oops, seven year old! could look!

"I'll try," he amended quickly with a laugh. "But Daddy's got to go to work, you know that and I might not be able to find anything before I get back. And I want to hurry back so I can see what you look like a whole year older, you know."

"You going to go save a little girl's life, Daddy?" she asked, the fists dropping away and her arms suddenly wrapping around his neck. "A little girl like me maybe, if there's one who's sick?"

God forbid I have to, baby, he thought, but said, "I'm going to do my best to help whoever I can, sweetie. I hope there aren't any little girls who are sick though. Don't you?"

She planted a quick peck of a kiss on his cheek, said, "Yes! But hurry up and come home, Daddy, 'cause we all miss you and sometimes Mommy cries."

She was gone in a small whirlwind of denim and pink and Frank, still down on one knee, looked up and met Sheila's eyes. Out of the mouths of babes. He hadn't known she cried sometimes when he was gone.

Before he could get sappy on her, she pointed to his position and said, "If you think the getting down on your knee and proposing again thing is going to cut you any slack, mister, you're out of your mind. It's your turn to dry the dishes and there's no negotiating." She stopped, halfway turned back toward the kitchen. "That is, unless of course..." she faced him full on again, a half smile on her beautiful, beloved face, a spark in her dark eyes, "you wanted to buy me a dishwasher."

Frank laughed, got up. Ouch. Was that old age creeping up into his back? No way. "We'll talk," he said, "but I'm afraid you're out of luck on those dishes, love of my life. Connor called. We got an earlier flight. I'm on my way out the door."

She speared him with a glare before turning toward the kitchen and tossing over her shoulder, "You're gonna owe me big on this one, Powell. Leaving me alone with a birthday party and five six-year-olds to do alone. Big!"

He was still laughing at the image of a herd of rampant half-people rearranging the house and Sheila's nerves when they boarded the plane.

Papers rustling, chairs scraping, the distant whine of jet engines. Connor was getting way too accustomed to those auditory cues, a little too settled, a little too comfortable, a little too attached... and it was the last that he couldn't allow. It was a killer, and that was his missionto stop killers, not let himself get vulnerable.

The reports were complete, incredibly complete, if there was a shred of information available, the team had already found it and recorded it. He knew he could count on that always. It was almost funny, though, how he could read a report or note and tell who had written it without any signature just by how the personality bled into the paper.

Natalie was complete to the point of being microscopic. She could look at a smear on a slide of glass and practically read it before she slid it under the prongs of the microscope. She had the feel as Madylyn, the nearly mythical guru of the labs said; about the highest compliment ever given out. This morning though, she seemed preoccupied, kept fingering a small silver charm on a thin weave of bracelet. He wondered, but she hadn't offerred to explain, so he hadn't brought it up.

Miles was shuffling through a stack of papers, his ever present laptop at his elbow with an array of CDs spread out like a hand of cards beside it. The kid must study 24 hours a day. Connor knew the young man would make a superior doctor, already was as young as he was, but whether or not he'd make a good NIH operative... well, that remained to be seen. Not that his heart wasn't in it; it was, sometimes too much, another liability.

Eva looked tired, a little distant, as if she'd sat up during the night making life altering decisions, and forgot to stock her place with enough coffee for the endeavor. Or maybe she was PR'ing another young up-and-coming Senator on the side. Eva could do the impossible; if they needed vaccine that wasn't available, she could find it; if they needed emergency transport, she could provide anything, up to Air Force One; she was completely invaluable. Without her, people would die. But sometimes Stephen wondered where her priorities lay. Where her loyalties lay.

"Thanks a lot, Stephen," Frank grumbled in a half serious tone as he wandered back to the table with a cup of coffee, "now I have to get 'another' present for Marcy since I'm not going to be here for her birthday today. You're making an extortionist out of my youngest daughter."

"Ah," Connor said, his thoughts lifting, his mind switching back into work mode, "just helping her with her job skills, Frank. Okay, people, everyone got a copy of the report?"

Hate is a powerful tool.

He knew that by intellect, but he also knew it by close, personal kinship. He held his hatred close, cherishing it, waiting for it to be fed, nourished, filled. And he was patient. Very patient. He had to be or he never would have done it. It was an achievement that could have been Nobel Prize material if it weren't twisted. If it weren't meant to kill rather than to save. His hate had changed him, molded him from a man he no longer even recognized into what he was now.

So much planning, so much work. If they hadn't pushed him aside, maybe it would have been different, maybe he would have used his vast talent for something else. No matter. It was too late.

Soon it would begin and he had every step planned. Each small piece to tear off the man's soul.

The old pickup truck had been cheap. 800. And even that had been more than it had been worth at least by half, but that didn't matter either. Money wasn't much of a consideration any more. This might as well be a suicide mission. That didn't matter much any more either. What did he have to live for anyway? He'd done it. He'd gotten the bug just right; he'd seen it in the faces of the people who came into the small hospital, tearing away at their lungs, corroding their stomachs, being killed by inches. It was hard not to gloat.

The NIH team was already on the way here. Connor at their head.

His plans for them were as carefully planned and laid out as his work on the mutated disease.

The first one... it hadn't really been all that difficult to find out about her love of the piano, her daydreams as a child, that melancholy that would exist when reminded. A reminder such as a tiny, silver charm. She would be first.

Having had Jack as a son had either strengthened Connor or tapped into a vulnerable side he hadn't been aware of having harbored. Oh, he'd never been stone cold or even totally impassive; but there had always been an ability to slot things into their proper perspectives. He'd trained himselfor was it been trainedto be willing and able to stand back, hold himself outside the emotion of the moment so that he could be at his most effective.

His military tour hadn't hurt that attitude either. War was a great equalizer. Sometimes he simply had to see the disease alone and school himself to envision a blank where the face of the victim should be, and there were times when he wondered if that made him a monster.

Times like this when he walked into a situation where people were dying and his job was to stop the dying, not help those who were going through it. He had to maintain some detachment or he'd never be effective, but the small knot of people standing at the nurse's desk made him wonder at his own resolve. An elderly man, bent nearly double with grief, his adult children trying to support him both physically and emotionally while they were crushed beneath the weight of their own loss. A child, maybe eight years old, not comprehending everything, but seeing too much, watching them with huge, vacant eyes.

Stephen had to move on past them quickly. He found the door he was seeking then and knocked.

Dr. George Portman had worked long and hard to get himself to his current position as chief of staff of the small Henryville General Medical Hospital and even so, there were people who couldn't understand his leaving a lucrative career in research to a small town doc. His wife was one of those people. She put up with it for a year, waiting for George to come to his senses, and when it became clear he wasn't budging, she packed up and moved home to mother and dad and her extensive trust fund. No matter, he had simply put his energy deeper into his work... both the hospital and his little side project.

He heard the knock and hesitated a moment before answering. It wasn't going to be pleasant seeing Stephen Connor again, even with the buffer of several years, but if he didn't answer that door, nothing would be accomplished. He wondered if Stephen felt the same way. Or if he even knew what losing the position of NIH division chief to him had meant to George. Well, he'd know soon.

"Come on in, Stephen," he called.


	3. Red Herring, Part Three

Natalie wasn't particularly amused.

It wasn't that she minded doing leg work or scut work or any work for that matter. In fact, sometimes any excuse to get out of the lab or the hospital or the clinic–wherever the latest emergency had led them–was a good excuse, even if it was to run pick up medical supplies that should have been on hand when she reached the hospital. Not to mention, this wasn't her job. Sure, she knew this place was a backwater town with little or no medical backup, but she had been assured that the medical and lab supplies would be there, not thirty miles down a winding mountain road. Not even really a mountain of course, just a craggy rock faced wall, but the road was sharp curved and badly paved.

Not a fun drive after their plane ride here and no time to do more at the motel than to drop her bags on the bed.

She hadn't even gotten much of a chance to do more than a quick, cursory look-over of the lab before she found out that the med and research supplies were sitting in another town waiting to be picked up and there didn't seem to be anyone to spare to go get them. She hadn't even had a chance to meet Dr. Portman before she finally, in a fit of pique she admitted, decided to go get the damn things herself. An hour's drive more or less and she'd have what she needed. She told Eva where she was going, declined the offer of company. Eva had her own work to do and Nat didn't need a babysitter while she ran errands. So here she was following rambling directions scrawled on the back of a restaurant paper place mat and getting drowsier by the second.

At least the countryside was pretty, an overall sense of green taking over the world and she laughed at her own whimsy. It was just trees, trees and grass and winding roads and sunlight glinting off the windshield and she was getting so sleepy...

Her head was stuffed with cotton, her mouth so dry that her tongue was literally stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her arms were too heavy to lift and the new bracelet was cutting into her wrist. New bracelet?

That woke her completely. She didn't have a new bracelet but something was surely cutting into her wrist. Prying her eyes open, she had to take a moment to focus. If she hadn't known good and well that she had eaten eggs and bacon and drunk coffee aboard the plane that morning, she would have sworn she had dropped a bit of acid. Not that she'd been much for experimentation like that in her wild college years. She almost laughed. Natalie wasn't exactly a wild child, before or after college. But right now she would have sworn that she was on some sort of drug.

But her wrist...

That was no bracelet. In a reactive panic, she yanked her hand and only succeed in scraping a long red mark across her wrist where the handcuff tore at the skin.

"Stop it," she told herself, "just stop it and get in control."

She took stock of her situation. Her right hand was handcuffed to the steering wheel, she had a large, very sore bump forming on her forehead but no obvious sign of concussion. The car was still idling so she hadn't been unconscious long. The sleepiness that had probably driven her off the road in the first place was gone, something else to add to the drug reaction idea that was rapidly becoming more than just a passing thought.

"Okay, okay," she said, breathing hard, "I guess it's safe to say this was no accident." Somehow the sound of her own voice was a little reassuring. Until she looked out the window that is. The car was balanced at the edge of a break off on the side of the road. A sheer drop into what looked like a rock quarry. All it would take was for her to start trying to do something that would rock the vehicle, like trying to somehow break the steering wheel that held her pinned to the handcuffs, and she and the car would go over to break up on the jagged edges of stone below.

Now was a bad time to remind herself of her fear of falling too.

And that was when she saw it. On the seat right next to her. A small box, just like the one the doorman had given her this morning, only this one was placed carefully on the seat, open. Inside, nestled in a bed of purple satin was another silver charm. This one a plain upright piano but just as beautiful as the grand piano had been. A tiny sliver of silver.

There was no way Stephen had given her this one, no way anyone had given it to her except whoever had cuffed her hand to the steering wheel in a car balanced at the edge of a rock face. Someone who knew her deepest fear?

She barely kept herself from screaming.

"Did you know that I was up for your position?" George Portman asked as he handed over a cup of still steaming coffee.

Stephen's eyes jerked up from the cup, his hands having to take over from instinct to accept the hot mug. "No," he said honestly, "no one told me that."

Portman shrugged. "They wouldn't have, of course. It was all so hush hush. And that's one of the reasons I was glad you got it, Stephen, and not me, to be honest. I had just about had all the bureaucratic BS I could handle in one lifetime. Which..." He gave Connor a grin and nodded at the small office, "is why I ran off to become Grizzly Adams."

"You like it here?"

"Oh yeah, I've become quite the redneck. I drink at Annie's Bar & Grill–you should stop there, by the way. Great food. Try the French Dip. I think Annie puts half a cow in each one. I've even been known to catch Montel once in a while."

He laughed, a big, booming laugh that Connor had forgotten. The laugh reminded them that they had been friends once, that they'd shared a lot of laughter and more than one beer together before Connor had been tapped for NIH and George had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth.

"Seriously, Stephen," he leaned forward in his seat, coffee cup warming his hands, "I've got all the time I want here to do any little research projects I want to do, don't have to answer to any bigwig who can't wait for a solution that might not even exist. I haven't gotten a single new grey hair since I"ve been here. Can you say the same?"

The question was an odd one and could have been taken as anything from a challenge to friendly banter. Connor wasn't sure how to respond. George saved him the effort.

"It's good to see you," he continued, "no, really, it is good to see you. Everyone changes, Stephen, and I'm no exception. I was a real son of a bitch when I was in the business. I know I was so don't bother trying to be polite. Don't look so uncomfortable. I've always wanted to make up for some that, and maybe this is my chance. Though I'm sorry for what brings you here."

Stephen leaned forward in the chair, his cup forgotten in his hands. "I'm glad you feel that way, George, but we can talk over old times when this mess is over, okay? What have you got? Our report was pretty sketchy."

"Sure, sure," Portman said, leaning back. "What was I thinking. I just wanted you to know that this is my home and these are my friends and neighbors. There's nothing clinical about this and not a whole lot about me that's the same as I used to be. I just wanted you to know that."

He considered his folded hands. "I've already lost two people and they were people I know. It's presenting as malaria and I'm treating with chloroquine and primaquine but only half those sick are responding to the meds.

"Weather conditions this year have set the stage for a bumper crop the damn things. The rains this year have flooded farmlands and filled ditches and low areas with stagnant water especially here in the southern part of the state. As you know, mosquitoes breed in stagnant water. We've had people out draining anything that even looks like it could harbor malarial mosquitos.

"We're doing a lot of clean up but not getting any closer to finding out what's causing this outbreak or why it's resistant to the usual treatments. I've got labs set up for your people with water samples from everywhere we could think of in the area, but you'll have to realize that this is backwater, USA. I only have so much at my disposal, and we've got more than 50 species of mosquitoes just here in Indiana."

Rubbing his fingers against his temple, he took a drink from the cup still held in his left hand, then added, "I've put out the word. You have to remember how small this place is... it's not a matter of starting a panic. Everyone knows what's going on anyway, probably even before I did. So putting out information isn't going to cause a great stampeded to Louisville or anything, just the opposite in fact in most cases. These folks have been here for several generations. Ain't no damn bug takin' what's rightfully theirs."

It was a credible mimickery of someone, Stephen just wasn't sure who, so it had to be local. "What steps have the locals taken?" he asked.

"Anything that can hold water, a birdbath, a wading pool, an old bucket, or a clogged storm drain, is a potential breeding spot, as you know, so these have been emptied or moved so that they don't collect water. Discarded tires, clogged rain gutters are more difficult to monitor, but the word's out and people are pretty conscientious around here. Especially when folks they know are dying."

He drained his cup, set it on the table beside him, then said, "The rest of it, I'm afraid, is up to you and your people. 'Cause I'm out of ideas."

They'd only been here twelve hours and he was already exhausted.

Miles sank back into the lone chair in the makeshift office and sprawled his lanky body back into as close to a lying down position as he could manage in a poorly stuffed 'easy' chair.

Dr. Portman had piled on cases of patient files for him to go through so that they could try to find common denominators. Miles had gone through every single one of them painstakingly but couldn't find any errors that stood out or mis-diagnoses in his first run-through.

He had, of course, visited the four new cases brought in since their arrival as well as the surviving cases still in the hospital. No breakfast, no sleep on the flight over and doing all the research work himself was making Miles not a happy camper.

Having to swat at another mosquito that had decided he was a good candidate for lunch didn't do anything to brighten his mood either. Especially since mosquitos were the most likely potential source donors of the current outbreak of this disease that was mimicking malaria.

He knew better than to skip meals too, though whether the stale sandwich he'd managed to snag out of the vending machine sometime in the vicinity of lunch counted as a meal or not was a different matter. Dinner was some vague promise he couldn't quite see yet–or was that breakfast again.

And where the heck was Natalie?

She should have been back hours ago, doing half of this work as well as most o f the required research. He'd called the pharmacy in Indianapolis but they told her she'd left right on schedule. If she'd had a break down or a flat tire, why hadn't she called to say she was going to be held up?

The question remained, where was she?

He thumped up to an actual sitting position in the chair. Sure, it was possible that she hadn't called, or just hadn't been able to get through and there was nothing more wrong other than that she was waiting for car parts somewhere in TeenyTinyVille, Indiana with no mobile service and all the phones in town broken down, but for twelve hours?

He pushed his weary body out of the chair and went looking for Stephen.

Sometime during the late evening it had started to rain.

The wind rose steadily, then would recede almost visibly, each time with a new spate of scratching at the car doors. Were they locked? She couldn't remember and in the darkness now, she couldn't see the other side of the car. Which didn't matter anyhow, she reminded herself with a twitch of irritation at having forgotten something so basic as remembering whether or not she had locked her doors. They were that 'magic, no visible lock' wonders so there was no post to see, and with the electricity gone, she couldn't try them. The car was dead. She'd tried so many times to turn the key and beg a response from the engine that she'd quit counting fruitless attempts.

Besides even if the windows were locked, what good would it do? If she couldn't get hers–the only one she could reach with the handcuff–open from the inside... besides if she did get it open, she was just going to step into ebony emptiness.

All she really knew was that she was way out in the middle of proverbial nowhere. Ideas swirled in her head, and the scritch/scratch on the sides of the car didn't help. She began to wonder if there were wolves in Indiana. Stupid, she berated herself. Even if there were wolves the only time she'd have to worry about them would be if she were in a Stephen King novel and she was pretty sure that wasn't the case. And wolves! What on earth was she thinking?

"I'm thinking I'm alone in a car that's poised to go over the side of a rock face who knows is how far down," she found herself saying out loud, just for the comfort of her own voice, "after being sabotaged and stalked..."

Stalked.

Only then did it actually sink in. She'd been stalked. The charm. The one she'd so foolishly thought from was from Stephen. Get over that schoolgirl crush, she chastised herself automatically. He already had one wife dump him because he's got one love and one love only and it doesn't have anything to do with a living, breathing, needy woman. But the charm, it was something terrible and sickening now. And the one on the seat beside her... well, no longer... she'd swept it to the floorboards somewhere in a moment of panic... that meant that whoever had sent them had been in the car with her. Had sabotaged the car, then set her up cliffside, cuffed to the wheel and helpless.

That was what the most terrifying... how helpless she had been, how helpless she was now... she'd checked long ago for her cell phone... gone, like her purse, even her sweater.

Now all she could do was watch the rain, listen to the snickety-snick of wind against the sides of the car and try to keep herself still so that she didn't sent the vehicle–and herself–hurtling over the edge.

"Stephen, she left on time, there's no paper trace of her on the way back here, and the local polie have no reports of an accident between here and there, so she's somewhere between here and there," Eva said, the tightness of her voice betraying her worry. "I alerted the Highway Patrol and the local law enforcement forces. They're searching right now."

"We need to get out there and look ourselves."

Connor held up a hand. "Frank, we'd only be getting in their way right now. We don't know the area, they do. They have the manpower and equipment to search and we have a job to do right here."

"Natalie's out there somewhere," Miles was on his feet, nearly in Connor's face, "she could be hurt, dead. And you trust strangers to find her?" he demanded.

With surprising kindness, Connor rested a hand on the young doctor's shoulder, stared into his weary eyes and said, "Miles, I feel just the same as you do. I want to get out there and find her myself too. But we have to do our job here. There's a bad storm out there. We wouldn't be able to see what we were doing and we don't know the area well enough to go into it blind. If we were out there instead of here and just one person died needlessly, do you think Natalie would want that?"

Defeated, Miles dropped back into the chair, rubbing at his eyes. Connor stepped over to him and again touched his shoulder. "I want you to go get some sleep. Now. No arguments. Just get a few hours rest and then come back. Your patients need you awake and alert."

He turned to Eva, "Eva, I want you to keep in touch with the locals of course, let me know anything that you hear. Anything. And as soon as you hear it."

"Stephen, I'm a toxicologist. I've run every test known to man on this stuff and come up with malaria. We know it's not malaria. But it's telling us it is malaria. At least a strain we haven't previously identified in any known trials. There are no other tests left to try to separate any inconsistencies out of the bacteria or the cells. I've juggled blood, body fluids, skin cells. I've scoured homes, vehicles and bodies. It's up to the medical team now."

Connor looked up from the papers he was trying to wade through. He almost hated to look away from them because they seemed to multiply every time he wasn't watching closely.

"What are you telling me, Frank?"

"I want to go out there."

"Looking for Nat."

"That's right."

"Go."

It was pretty ridiculous to think that he was going to find something that the Highway Patrol and the locals hadn't been able to turn up considering the darkness, the storm, and that he wasn't familiar with the area, but that didn't stop Frank. Besides, he rather doubted that any of the people currently searching for Natalie had as much invested in her well-being as he and the rest of the team did, nor had they been trained for jungle warfare like he had.

That warfare training included dealing with an enemy most people didn't consider: the weather.

Weather like this was a physical entity. It had behaviors. Functions. Secrets. And he knew how to deal with them. He knew how to see signs beneath the storm that other people would miss. It was just a matter of time, time and long, hard, tedious work.

Three hours after he'd started looking, in a lucky strobe of lightning, he saw the tracks, nearly washed away by the still streaming rain.

Leaving his own vehicle after radioing his location to the authorities searching with him, he found the car completely concealed behind trees and brush, right at the edge of the embankment of a deep ravine, the front, driver's side tire resting on air, the rear end tipped precariously. Too much rocking would dislodge the entire thing and send it hurtling below onto jagged rocks. He slid down the mud-treacherous slope until he reached the passenger's side window.

When he tapped on the glass and shone his light inside, Natalie turned her head and nearly screamed, then gasped, "Oh thank God, Frank. Thank God."

"Don't move," he told her. "Don't move. I'll get you out."

And he prayed he was telling her the truth.

Eva was so accustomed to being able to call upon her own resources that it came as somewhat of a culture shock to realize that 'resources' here in Henryville consisted of take out dinners from the one diner in town and hunting licenses from the postman/shop owner/ranger at the proper times of the year.

It was a matter of 'run your own errands' and hope there was time enough to fit them all in.

So far, the trip to what passed for town hall.., the basement of one Miss Elmira Ferguson.., hadn't yielded much in the line of past medical records or history of any prior outbreaks of anything resembling malaria in this or surrounding counties.

Elmira was a sweet faced woman in her 70's who was thrilled with the company of someone other than her two yellow-striped tabbies and an old hound who reminded Eva of old movies about chain gangs -- she kept pushing tea and cookies on her because Eva was "way too skinny" and needed to fatten up. The old gal was most forthcoming with local lore and town gossip but nothing like this had happened in her memory or in any of the records she had browsed through herself so she wasn't much help, much to her dismay. She wanted nothing more than to be a help.

And to have company. For Eva to stay just a little while longer.

Her memory of the town records was amazing, Eva thought, and she was a little saddened to realize that this was probably all the old lady had... her musty town records and her two cats, Tom and Skeedaddle, not to mention Copper, the hound, who stared at her balefully from beneath the dining room table. The little house was impeccable, all the way down to the doilies on the tables and the antimacassars on the arms and backs of the chairs. Eva almost grinned at remembering that antimacassars were furniture protectors and not some kind of 'macassar' hater, as she had informed her great aunt when she was nine years old, and been firmly corrected.

Eva was probably the highlight of her year. Maybe even her decade.

She was almost sorry to leave because of the crestfallen look on the woman's road-mapped face, but there was nothing more to be learned here except what she had: nothing like this had happened in this area for more than 150 years and no records went back further than that.

She was halfway back to the town proper when she saw the fishtailing tire marks even through the rain on the highway, leading around a sharp, tree-concealed curve. An old, beater–a sedan of indeterminate model–was skewed sideways on the road once she rounded the curve, one door open, a man leaning forward from the driver's seat, his head in his hands.

Pulling in behind him, she reached under the front seat for her first aid kit, then ducked her head as she sprinted through the rain toward the car to offer what help she could, her cell in her hand to call for assistance as soon as she triaged the situation.


	4. Red Herring, Part Four

Bobbie Michaelson sank into a garish orange plastic chair outside the hospital room that had practically been her second home ever since her husband had come down with the new mystery disease. She rubbed her face, her eyes red from tears she had kept private from him but now had no defense against. They slid down her face unchecked and she sniffled, embarrassed to be caught in such weakness in front of the doctor from the big city.

"I'm sorry," she said around a muffled sob, "I don't mean to–" she waved a hand helplessly, "I'm sorry, Dr.–?"

"Natalie. Call me Natalie. And don't be sorry. You can only be brave for everyone else for so long. Then it has to come out." She leaned forward, closer to the woman, placing one hand on her shoulder.

Almost instantly, she drew he hand back when she saw the angry red ring on the skin of her wrist, a haunting reminder of struggling against the handcuff. If Frank hadn't found her when he did... she wasn't sure how long the car would have teetered on the edge of the cliff but it looked a lot worse from outside the vehicle than from within...

She swallowed hard, wondering why she hadn't said anything about the charms. Because she'd thought they were from Stephen? Because it was a stupid thing to do, accept gifts without knowing where they were from? They weren't gifts, she reminded herself, they were lures. It was crazy not to turn them over to the police, but she simply couldn't make herself do it. There was that tiny frisson of fear that it might just possibly cast a shadow of doubt, a shred of suspicion onto Stephen. She simply couldn't do it.

"Bobbie, how long before you brought your husband in did he show signs of being sick? Anything, headache, stomach problems, anything."

Bobbie pulled a wad of kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose, then pursed her lips as she thought over her answer. "I'm not sure, really, Dr–, Natalie. Cody doesn't complain when he gets sick, I mean not really sick. If he gets a little cold or something small like that, he whines like a baby." She smiled fondly. "Wants to be waited on hand and foot. But if he's really sick, he barely says anything, just rides it out."

She looked down at the mess of tissue in her hands, stuffed it away in her pocket, then looked up. Her eyes were red, her face pale and wan. She looked tired, older than her 30 years by weariness and worry. "Is he going to be okay, Natalie? Is he going to die?"

Natalie lifted her hand to the woman's shoulder and rubbed it softly. She simply didn't have an answer.

If he pulled his hair out every time they were caught with a seemingly unsolvable disease, Miles decided he'd be bald before he ever got close to thirty, so he resisted the urge to grab handfuls of hair. Again.

He had to get out of the hospital, if just for a few minutes, and the portico bench seemed like the ideal place. Close enough to be reached at a moment's need, far enough away to not have to see the sick faces, or the worried families. Natalie had the right idea. Sequester yourself in the laboratory and not have to deal with patients.

That wasn't fair and he felt a surge of guilt the instant he thought it. Natalie was good in the lab. Great, in fact, and that was why she was there more often than she was at a bedside. Right now, he was just feeling sorry for himself. Sorry and alone.

His buddies from college, the ones who would associate with a kid several years their junior at least, were settling down with families or still out partying hard, something he'd always either been too young to do or studying too hard to have time for. Instead, now, he was watching people die because he didn't know enough, move fast enough, care enough.

And oh God he cared.

Sometimes he thought he cared too much, if that was possible. He didn't know how Connor did it. Maintained that edge, that detachment. He envied the man the ability to walk away when he had to, to slot things into a proper perspective, not let them eat him alive from the inside out. Maybe he wasn't cut out for this after all.

Absently, he stuck his hand into his pocket and found the watch fob, all but forgotten in the long hours and stress. Now, he took it out and let if fall into the palm of his hand. A caduceus. The double snakes wound up around the staff, the medical calling symbol his grandfather had carried with pride for as long as Miles could remember.

A shadow fell over him and he looked up, startled.

"Rough day?"

"Connor?"

"That rough, huh?" Connor sat down next to him and glanced over at his hand. "What you got there?"

Miles looked up at him again. "I thought..." He laughed, a short, soft snort. "I thought it was from you. I didn't think anyone else would know. Or care."

"What are you talking about, Miles?" There was a lacing of concern in Stephen's voice now. Miles looked tired but Stephen couldn't quite puzzle out what was bothering him other than the obvious.

"It's my grand–" He looked at the fob, realizing only then that it could be anyone's. There had been no engraving on this one or on his grandfather's to differentiate them from any other. "I thought it was my grandfather's. Thought you came across it somehow and sent it to me. My father wouldn't have bothered so it had to..." He ducked his head away, having said too much and only catching himself at it too late to recall the words. "I didn't think anyone else would know about this but you."

Stephen placed a hand on the younger man's shoulder, said, "Miles, I'm sorry. I don't know anything about it. I wish I did. I would have been honored to send it to you."

The words hit Miles hard. He blinked away emotion, cleared his throat, shoved the watch fob back into his pocket, then cleared his throat again. When he spoke his voice was steady, "My patients aren't getting any better, Stephen. So far there's a 20 fatality rate. And Natalie isn't having much luck in the lab either. She knows it's not airborne at this point, but not much more. It's got to be ingested but how, she has no idea. People in the same household are fine. Only one affected per household. It mimics Malaria but standard Malaria treatments aren't working."

He rubbed a hand across his eyes, not looking at Stephen. "We're losing people and not coming up with options."

"Okay," Stephen said, squeezing his shoulder, wishing there were many things he could say right now, having none, "just keep at it, Miles." Wanting to offer more, he added, "Frank has run tests on everything from the local water supply to the coffee at the 7/11 and the burgers at the Dairy Queen. We'll find it."

Her mouth tasted like something had lived and died there.

Eva managed to turn over and reach for the light switch, her mind numb, her body aching and cold. There was no light switch. No mattress. No table. And when she considered sitting up and putting a foot on the floor, there was no floor.

Well, there was, it was just that she was lying on it.

Not exactly a floor either. More like dirt. Hard packed dirt that smelled like... well, dirt. She felt suddenly like a potted plant. But then she realized that her eyes were open after all, she hadn't been out drinking the night before, and she was shivering herself into exhaustion.

She rolled onto her hands and knees, dizzy and nauseated, but that paled when she realized that she was either blind or it was pitch black wherever she was. She had never known what exactly 'pitch black' looked like before, but now she did, with excruciating clarity. Something brushed against her cheek and she screamed, scuttled backward like a beetle until her back hit the side of a wall or more dirt, she wasn't sure which, only that she was in pure darkness and that she was terrified and that she couldn't stop screaming. And screaming.

And that there was no one there to hear her.

Natalie curled her hands around a cup of coffee. One of those thick, white cups that she hated but the only thing available, so she settled. At least the coffee smelled good.

She saw Frank coming before she heard him and smiled. That was one thing that always surprised her about Frank. For a big man he moved so silently. Maybe it shouldn't have surprised her considering his SEAL background, but it always did. He returned her smile and pulled a chair around to sit opposite her.

"So, tell me..." he began and she had a bad feeling.

"Tell you what?" she countered suspiciously.

"Tell me what you didn't tell the cops."

"What are you talking about?" But she sat up straighter in her chair and her hands tightened around the coffee cup and she realized her mistake too late. Of course Frank wouldn't miss it.

He simply raised his eyebrows at her and she sighed. "There was a charm yesterday morning," she said. "It was delivered to me by the doorman. All mysterious, no way to tell who it was from, but it was a grand piano. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a pianist."

"I didn't know that," he said, settling in to listen, that big brother Frank concern on his face so obviously that she actually smiled.

"Very few people do. Stephen is one of them. I thought it was from him."

"And now you don't think so?"

"Now I know it's not, but when the police showed up I was so..."

"Upset," he supplied.

"Yes, upset, that I wasn't thinking clearly."

"Understandable."

"Are you going to let me explain?" she asked with fond exasperation.

He spread his hands in a gesture of surrender.

She sighed. "Okay. I didn't say anything because I was confused. I had thought it was from Stephen but when I woke up after the car... wreck–" she'd started to say accident, knew that wasn't true "there was another one on the seat beside me. Stephen couldn't have put it there. At least he couldn't have unless he was the one who caused the wreck, which would mean he had tried to kill me." She huffed in air. "I told you I wasn't thinking clearly."

"Yes, you told me that," he agreed.

"How did you know?"

He reached into his pocked and when he opened his hand, she could see the second piano charm–the one that had been on the car seat–laying in his palm.

"Why didn't you say something?" she demanded.

"I wanted to be sure," was all he would say.

"What do we do now?" she asked with a sigh.

Frank gave her an 'isn't it obvious' look. "We go to the cops."

Exhausted, Eva sat slumped into the hard-packed dirt, wiping the tears from her eyes, her fingers smearing mud across her face. She wondered what she must look like and almost laughed, caught herself and then really did laugh, the sound strangled, harsh. She was afraid to laugh in case someone might hear her? She'd been screaming herself hoarse, not to mention deaf, for the last fifteen minutes. A little laughter wasn't going to hurt anyone.

Okay, she told herself, time to start doing something rational and hopefully productive. Gingerly, she got to her feet, found she could stand, though she had to stand stooped over to avoid hitting her head on the wooden ceiling. Spiders. She just knew there had to be spiders in here.

But the little creepy crawlies weren't her fear, the dark, closed in space was.

"You're going to stay in there until you learn not to take the Lord's name in vain." She curled her arms around herself, her knees drawn up to her chest, and cried. She cried until dinner time when her foster mother finally let her out of the dark closet if she promised to do better, to never swear again, to do anything that would keep her out of that dark, frightening place.

Shaking off the memory, Eva steeled herself to uncurl from the floor and try to make out shapes in the darkness, the earthy smell rankling her nostrils.

Exploration seemed to be the next order of business.

Right after wondering who the hell had done this to her in the first place.

Obviously the guy she'd decided to be a good Samaritan for--or else he'd be stuck inside here with her. Or he was dead--the thought piggy backed on top of that one. Oh, geez, let's see if we can't totally scare ourselves to death. So, no driver in aid joining her, so that was the baddie. The main question was, who did this?

Images and gruesome tales of serial killers tripped in right after that question. If she could get her mind to shut up, she might be able to unfreeze herself and get something accomplished. So with dire warnings to herself to stay on task and ignore the fact that she had obviously been drugged and dumped into a damp, dark, tomb-like box, she started out to determine the dimensions of her enclosure.

It was roughly the size of what she assumed a cell would be, probably smaller. Feeling along with her hands wasn't much of a judge of space. And she'd found out at least what it was. A root cellar or at least storage. There were rough-hewn shelves along three walls with a few bottles and one box of rice that had something in it that moved. She didn't touch the box again. It hadn't been used in a long time, was nearly cleaned out. Not much chance of Farmer Brown's sweet-faced wife coming along any time soon to find her and let her out.

The second, and more important discovery she made was that there was a door on the top–locked of course, and from the outside where she couldn't even play with the lock–made of weathered wood. It was old wood and splintered, but her hopes that it would be weak were quickly dashed when she put one of her shoes on her fist and tried to knock a hole in one of the planks. The wood held, her hand felt like she'd slammed it into... well, a thick board.

That idea out of the way, she felt her way back to one of the rows of shelves, picked up the heaviest Mason jar she could find and smashed it against the shelf. It bounced off and hit her in the stomach.

Now that hurt. She doubled over and rubbed her lower belly where the jar had impacted. Okay, the jars were unbreakable. She knew that about Mason jars; they were made for canning fruits and vegetables at high temperatures. Of course it was going to be virtually unbreakable without something harder than they were. There had to be something she could use to dig her way out of here, just enough digging to sabotage the lock. Root cellars are locked to keep people from getting in, not out. Back on her knees, she started doing a blind inch by inch search with her hands. It took her two hours, but she finally found it, under the last shelf, of course, but a length of pipe, strong and heavy enough to dig away at packed earth.

Vince Gill getting his heart broken on the jukebox, an overworked waitress who had seen better years even before she started working at The Last Chance, backwards baseball caps and bluejeans, and cigarette smoke.

Ah the good old days.

Frank stepped inside and did a quick recon of the dimly lit room, finding what he was looking for in the darkest corner of the small bar.

Frank shook his head as he watched the long legged, long haired blonde give up on her attempt at striking up a conversation, and wander away from the morose young man sitting hunched over a half glass of probably warm beer. Oh, Miles, what is wrong with your hormones, boy, he wondered, as the blonde headed back to the bar. Must be worse than I thought.

He wended his way through the crowd, surprisingly large for a Tuesday night, skirted around the pool table with its stereotypical good ol' boys hunkered down around it, and snagged himself a beer from the bar.

The look he got from Miles wasn't welcoming. "Stephen send you to drag me home?"

"Naw, I sent myself to drag you." Without waiting for an invitation, he turned a chair backwards and straddled it, snugging it up to the table. After a long draw off the beer--it had been a long, long day--he said, "Stephen told me."

Miles bit his lower lip, considered, went for feigned ignorance. "Told you about what?"

That bad, huh? Frank thought wryly, and prayed he'd never hurt his own kids the way Miles' father had hurt him. It was written in every line of the kid's body, the slumped shoulders, the restless fingers toying with the half-drunk beer, the pulse jumping at his jawline.

"Want to play this game," he asked asked, "or do you want to try to talk it out with a friend?"

Miles ducked his head away, then swiped at his eyes, rubbed at his temples as if he had a headache. "I thought just maybe, just maybe, Frank," he said and there was more anger than sadness in his voice, "it might have been from my father. That he thought enough of me, or even enough of the old man, to send me something of his." He cleared his throat, looked away. "I should have known better."

"You going to let him keep doing this to you, Miles? Even when he's not anywhere around? He's not worth it."

"Doing what?" Miles came back at him, still angry. "I'm just having a beer, not turning into an alcoholic."

"You know what I mean. Letting him have this much power to hurt you." He reached forward across the table, tapped Miles' hand, patted it, then sat back again. "It sucks. It's not fair." He shook his head. "If you'd just give me the okay, I'd go rearrange his Armani lapels for him."

Startled, Miles looked up at that, caught the image in his mind, and laughed out loud. "You would, wouldn't you?" he said, still coming down off the laugh. "I'd almost let you. Except it wouldn't matter, Frank." He went serious again. "He wouldn't understand what the hell you were talking about. All my life, if there was a problem, dad just threw more money at me and that was supposed to take care of it. The only thing he couldn't 'fix' was grandad dying and I don't know if he really cared much about that."

He laughed again. "I sound like I ought to be coming out of that jukebox, don't I? Next thing, we'll be starting a bar fight."

Frank laughed back at him. "Not me, junior. You start a bar fight in this Redneck town and you're on your own. You figure out where it came from?"

"No, that's just it. No one else would have had it... well, one like it." He pulled the watch fob out of his pocket and handed it over to Frank. "I don't even think it's grandad's, Frank. It looks too new."

Frank turned the piece of leather over in his hands, then looked carefully at the metal caduceus attached, running his thumb over it. "Symbol of the medical profession," he said thoughtfully. "I always wondered why they used snakes to symbolize healing. Ah!" He held up a finger in a mock stop gesture. "I didn't ask for a long winded doctor explanation, Miles, just musing out loud."

That earned him another laugh and he could hear an easing of the tension in the kid's voice when he spoke. "It's pretty generic, but who else but one of you or my dad would know about my grandfather? And nobody would know about this except for my dad. Well, not many people, unless they researched it." He laughed again.

The word spiked Frank's attention. "Why do you say that? Researched it?"

"Oh nothing, I just meant that grandad made a big deal of presenting it to me when I graduated from college just before med school. It was in a lot of newspapers. Dad has always been real fond of his own press, he made sure he was in the picture. But why would someone want to know that?"

"Yeah," Frank agreed thoughtfully, "why would they." He started to hand the fob back, but then closed his fingers over it before Miles could reach for it. "Let me hang onto this for a while, would you?"

"What for?"

"I have strange fetishes."

"Oh, okay, well, then of course." Another laugh and the tension was gone.

"You done with that?" Frank nodded toward the beer.

Miles shoved the glass away. "Yeah, it's warm anyway."

"You always were a wussy drinker, kid."


	5. Red Herring, Part Five

Digging relentlessly with a tool ill suited for the purpose drove her to exhaustion. Exhaustion drove her to sleep. Sleep drove her to dreams.

They were there. She knew they were, somewhere just out of her reach, but within talon touch to her own skin. She shriveled back into the darkness, something brushing against her hair, grabbing at her face.

She started to scream, remembered that screaming only meant longer in the closet, and clamped her lips closed. It was just a dress. A stupid dress. That was all. It hung longer than the other clothes and when she'd drawn back deeper into the corner, it had passed over her face. That was all. A stupid dress.

Cut it out, Eva, she told herself. Ordered herself.

Why was she here? Why couldn't she go back to sweet Mrs. Calendar's home where the food was warm and the hands were gentle and there were no closets with little girls trapped inside them for perceived wrongs?

Oh yeah. Mrs. Calendar was over her quota. Eva was only 11. She wasn't sure what a quota was even though she had looked up the word. But it must be an evil word because it was the reason she was taken away and placed instead with the Malones. Mrs. Malone was okay, but she was a little woman who reminded Eva of a mouse, all turned inside on herself, afraid of her big husband.

Eva was afraid of Mr. Malone too. Oh, he never raised a hand to her, but any time he got angry, which was often, he put her in the closet, turned off the light in the room and left her there until he remembered to take her out or Mrs. Malone came to get her for supper. And she was afraid of the closet too, with its darkness, its huddled shapes, darkness within darkness. Little shifts and shivers of noise that her imagination took and ran away with.

She was afraid of the closet...

Eva startled awake, wrapped her arms around herself and moaned in the aftermath of the nightmare, rocking herself, seeking comfort in the darkness.

"Okay," she said out loud, if only for the sake of a human voice, "Okay, we'll start again."

She picked up the pipe and started gouging at the dirt again.

It wasn't bad enough that his patients were dying.

No, the NIH had to send the great Stephen Connor to save them all.

xxxXXXxxx

No one knew what was killing them yet, Dr. George Portman thought with a sour twist of humor as he drained his third glass of Kentucky Rye.

And Stephen's inability to come up with the right answers, instantly and in true golden boy fashion... well, it was simply too good to be true. Fat lot of good it does you to have all the resources of the NIH behind you now, right, Stevo.

Ah, you're enjoying this entirely too much, George, he told himself, feeling the booze washing around in his belly, clouding over his mind like a blanket of alien influence right out of the X-Files.

Buzz, buzz, the doctor's got a buzz. That would never do. Not even here in his own home. No, the town was too small, too tightly knit. If nothing else, somebody's dog would see him staggering around in his underwear and take out an ad in the Henryville Times. Now that was funny.

"I didn't care about the job, Connor, no problem, you just go ahead and take it. I'll go be a pill pusher in Henryville. You've heard of if, haven't you? Right next door to nothing. The wife... oh, she ran off with some jerk from Indianapolis. Couldn't take the scaled down living or the loss of prestige. Oh, yeah, Stephen, there was a loss of prestige. Big big loss."

He stumbled across the room, snagged the bottle by the neck and poured another three fingers. Damn, he was going to have alcohol poisoning if he kept this up. No problem. He just happened to know a doctor. And if the doc couldn't handle it, someone would call in the entire NIH special SWAT team to bail him out. After all, he wasn't good enough for them once, why shouldn't they be better than him this time?

He'd show them, he decided drunkenly, and he sat back in the recliner and sipped on the rye.

xxxXXXxxx

"You know you don't have to babysit me."

Frank wasn't put off by the note of irritation in Natalie's voice. "Can't I have a cup of coffee with a friend?"

She sighed, gave him a wan smile and touched his arm gently. "Of course you can. Did Stephen put you up to this?"

"What do you think?" he countered with a smile of his own. "Yes, he asked me to keep an eye on you, but, Natalie, you're my friend, too. I want to be sure you're okay."

Put her hand on his sleeve. "I'm sorry, Frank."

Pouring coffee, Frank asked with what he hoped was nonchalance. "What do you think of this Dr. Portman?"

Holding out her own cup to be filled, Natalie shrugged. "He seems fine. Small town doctor from a big town background. Seems to be fitting in with the locals from all I can see. They like him. He's conscientious. Why?"

It was Frank's turn to shrug. "Just wondered."

"Come on, Frank," she countered, "You wouldn't have brought it up for no reason. Tell me. I have noticed that there's tension between him and Stephen. What's that about?"

"It's more like what he has against me AND Stephen," Frank said with a laugh. "Although he's got a lot more reason to hate Stephen than me."

They doctored their coffee, Frank with sugar–he was tired, needed the kick--Natalie with cream and headed for the nearest small table in the deserted hospital break room.

"We were all three in the same unit when we were SEALS. Neither of us have heard a word from him since... well, since the NIH chair meeting that named the team heads." Frank shook his head. "Didn't expect to find him down here when we got the call. It had been a long time since we'd heard from him before that too. Not like he kept in touch.

"When we were in the SEALS, Stephen was promoted to team leader over George and that didn't go over very well as you can imagine. Seemed like Stephen was always trumping him while we were in the service together. George gave every appearance of taking it well, but you know how that little muscle in your jaw twitches when you get angry or frustrated, well, George twitched.

"But the real problem between Stephen and George came up when they were both up for the head of our team in the NIH. George wanted it, and he wanted it bad. Pinned all his hopes on getting it. Then at almost the last minute Stephen was brought in seemingly from out of nowhere, and he got the position instead. George seemed to take it well as usual, but he left the NIH altogether shortly after that, moved down here. His wife left him, I can only speculate on the reasons for that. The rest you can see. He seems to tolerate us just fine..."

"But that little muscle in his jaw..." Natalie put in with a smile.

"Twitches," Frank finished.

"Right."

She sipped at the lukewarm coffee for a moment, before saying, "Stephen hasn't had much to say to me lately."

"Hasn't had much to say to any of us, seems like to me. I've noticed. I think he doesn't like any of this. Being here. Being around George. Not getting a leg up on this disease. I'm beginning to think he doesn't like us very much either at the moment."

"Oh, don't be ridiculous," she said with a laugh, but there was concern in her voice. Connor had been scarce around the lab since they'd arrived here, but she just put it down to the fact that things weren't going well in the tests and he had to have gotten caught up in the investigation like he always did. Stephen could forget to eat if he was working. But it seemed to be more than that. Or maybe she was just a little paranoid because of the charms. Thinking they had come from Stephen at first. Even going so far as to not mention the second one to the police until Frank had come to her about it.

"Where is he anyway," she asked with what she hoped was casualness.

Frank hesitated, and she looked up sharply at that. Frank didn't hesitate. Frank acted, he spoke, he didn't waffle.

"Is something wrong with him?"

"No, no," he assured her. "He's fine, he's just... look, Nat..."

Oh no, she put the coffee down carefully because whatever it was it wasn't going to be good.

"Tell me."

"They found Eva's car last night. It was parked on the side of the road. No sign of an accident or anything else, so don't panic, but she wasn't in it and we haven't heard from her."

"Oh my God." Natalie's hand went to her mouth, the fear she'd felt trapped in the car rushing back like a black wave. "No."

"Natalie." Frank laid a hand on her arm. "I'm not going to lie and say it looks good, but there's no sign that anything violent happened there. Stephen went with the police to look for her. That's where he is now."

xxxXXXxxx

Thunder was rumbling its way across the horizon, a stiff breeze twisting the treetops. No telling for sure how far away the storm was, but Stephen didn't want Eva out alone in it. It was bad enough that she'd been missing this long and no one knew.

One of his was in danger, maybe hurt, and he hadn't even been on top of it enough to realize that she was missing in the first place. Eva could take care of herself, he wasn't negating her abilities, but there was a whole lot of nothing between where the little compact car she'd rented was found and anyone who could help if she'd had trouble. The car didn't give the appearance of trouble except that the driver's side door was open and that was enough. No one, especially Eva, would wander off and leave their car open to the elements or anyone who might come along and decide they'd like a ride.

She was either in trouble or hurt or lost.

He didn't like any of those options.

Bloodhounds were a sorry looking excuse for a dog, looking more like old men who should be sitting around a pot-bellied stove telling tales of their misspent youth, but they were they were very good at what they did. Their eerie hark-hark-hark was all around him now as the sheriff and his men searched the thick underbrush looking for her. The look in the sheriff's eye told Connor right away that they might be looking for her body, but he refused to accept that until he actually came across proof he couldn't debate.

They had to find her soon. It was getting chilled and dark and the wind was picking up with each step deeper into the woods they took, wind driven branches snatching at him like fingers plucking at his body. He pushed his way through the dense undergrowth and felt the first fat plops of rain against his coat.

xxxXXXxxx

Finally.

A clod of wood and dirt fell in on her at the same time, hitting her full in the face and Eva spluttered and sputtered and coughed it away. But her heart gave a lurch when she saw that there was now enough area exposed that she could get her hands around the rotting boards and pull. With their foundation dug away, they gave easily and she fell backward into the root cellar with two boards landing on top of her.

Not bothering to try to clear any of the dirt off, she scrambled to her feet and tugged at another board then a fourth. When there was enough room she shinnied her way out through the opening and breathed fresh air.

Landing on her back in thick grass, she lay there a moment, dragging in air, breathless from her labors and the excitement of her success. The first raindrops hit her full in the face. It only took her a moment to realize that whoever had put her there could still be around, watching, listening, expecting exactly this. Not about to wait for him, she scrambled to her feet and, after a moment to try to orient herself, began running in the direction that she thought the road might be.

Five minutes of being whiplashed by thick branches and pelted by heavier rain in the darkening woods, she heard the strange baying that could mean only one thing. Bloodhounds.

But that could mean two things...

Either help was only a few steps away or the man who had kidnapped her was searching for her with dogs.

She dodged behind a tree until the first pair of hounds came into view, then fell to her knees in relief.

xxxXXXxxx

The wind had picked up and brought with it the start of a storm, one that looked like it was going to settle in for a while. George set the bottle down, looked at the amount he'd poured into his glass, then picked it up and poured a little more. Too bad Connor wasn't here, he thought. They could drink to the past.

As if answering his thought, someone knocked sharply on the front door.

The rain had just started, not really rain yet, just a few fat droplets hitting the window with a plop barely noticeable over the wind. He wasn't expecting anyone, so maybe he really could have that drink with Stephen if that was him at the door. He'd been thinking. Thinking and drinking. Drinking and thinking.

Yeah, he was pretty drunk, but he'd come to some conclusions. He'd been harboring resentments better left dead. He hadn't seen the man in years, it was pretty ridiculous to still hold things against him that he couldn't have controlled. Besides, other than losing Elizabeth–and that was going to happen one way or the other–this hadn't been such a bad thing. He'd been happy here in his own little town. He was respected, his opinion counted, his staff looked up to him, from the other physicians all the way down to the janitor. Just the morning, Jack–what was his last name? the guy who did the cleaning–geez, he was just about invisible, wasn't he, his thoughts rambled, it was a surprise when he'd heard the man speak that morning–just that morning, Jack had told him how important he was to so many people. It was just the janitor, but, still it felt good.

He snorted. Now he was down to looking for approval from the guy who emptied the wastebaskets.

The knock repeated at the door.

Oh, yeah, the door.

Stephen, it should be Stephen, and they could have a drink, ease old wounds, mend the rift. Yeah, it would be Stephen and he'd be able to exorcize theghosts of the past. That would be nice. He took another quick gulp from the glass, felt it burn its way down his throat and made his wobbly way to the door.

"Oh, hi," he said, and barely felt the knife slip into his belly, then jerk upwards. His eyes were wide, gaping holes of confusion as he slid to the floor in a wash of his own blood.


	6. Red Herring, Part Six

"Miles, you have to spring me from here. I'm fine."

Miles sat on the edge of the hospital bed and patted her hand, grinning down at her. "You're fine when the doctor releases you, Eva." The smile vanished as quickly as it had come. "Seriously, Eva, you've been through quite an ordeal. If nothing else, you need rest. I know you'd rather be home in your own bed but you should be under observation." He raised his index finger in a mock 'hush' motion as she started to protest. "Just one night. That's all. You can handle that. Can't you?"

Eva slumped back against the pillows with a credible child's sulky expression on her face and her arms crossed over her chest.

"You should have to lie here in one of these beds with people poking you every fifteen minutes, Doctor," she said, grumpily, "then maybe you'd have a little more sympathy for me."

He laughed. "I'll come check on you, I promise–"

The bedside table began to chirp a cheerful tune and he raised one eyebrow at her as she grabbed her purse, pulling her cell phone out of it.

"They didn't say I couldn't have some of the comforts of home with me," she said with her own grin as she answered the insistent ring. "Eva Rossi."

Shaking his head, Miles stood, patted her hand again and headed for the door only to be stopped mid-stride.

"Miles, wait."

He turned back, took his seat on the bed again until she was finished.

"Miles, I have a huge favor."

"Just ask it."

"There's this little old lady that I interviewed when we were first looking for information... she's out in the woods, barely on the roads, no car, no family and kind of agoraphobic."

He was really looking at her curiously now and Eva couldn't blame him. Wait until he heard what she was about to ask him.

"Her name is Elmira Ferguson and I can draw you a map..."

"Draw me a map? As in, I'm going there? And she's really named Elmira?"

"She's 70 years old, Miles, names were different then and, yes, please go there. She thinks she's found something that will help. She is, was, sort of the town librarian, but also historian, and she thinks she's found something that could help us find out who might have been causing people to get sick. She knew, Miles, that someone was spreading the disease, that it wasn't accidental, so she must really have something. I can't go, they won't let me out of there." She was glaring at him as if that was somehow his fault. "And if I send the police she's panic. She's not been out of that house for forty years and she's very fragile. Connor or Frank would scare her to death and Nat–"

"Okay, okay," Miles said, both hands in the air in surrender. "Draw me the map."

xxxXXXxxx

This was his least favorite part of the hunt... the waiting. He'd long ago learned that he had to simply suck it up and endure it and nothing in the rule books said he had to like it. But the bait had been set. It wasn't hard to get the old broad to make the call, say what he wanted her to say, and luck would have it, he got the results he wanted.

People wouldn't admit it, but luck had a lot to do with how their plans matured and turned out. He wasn't afraid to say that he owed huge parts of his success to luck, nor was he above taking every chance that fortune sent his way.

No, it hadn't been difficult at all.

He'd almost been gratified that the little brunette had gotten away. He hadn't really foreseen her managing to dig her own way out of the root cellar, but more power to her. She was pretty damn cute too, would have been a shame if she'd died down there, but he did wonder how her dreams were shaping up tonight if she could sleep at all.

One more of the innocents needed to pay for what Powell and Connor had done and he was on his way right now, then it was down to the main event. Things had fallen into his schedule so far, no reason to think they wouldn't keep right on doing that.

But there was the waiting...

And the rain, beating down on him in the darkness... he hated the waiting, and he hated rain.

xxxXXXxxx

"I have it, Stephen."

Stephen looked up from the borrowed desk. Natalie was leaning against the doorframe, every inch of her body proclaiming exhaustion, but there was a smile on her face.

He stood, took her hand and led her into the office. "What do you have?" he asked, almost afraid she was going to say she had the disease from how weary she looked.

"It's definitely man made, but then we knew that," her voice started to gain speed as she warmed to it, "but I managed to isolate the main components... oh hell, none of the process matters. What counts is that we now have a way to combat the disease. I managed to break it down, slice it up, puree it and sautee it." She laughed. "Sorry, I'm a little punchy. I haven't slept in a while. But the point is that we can now treat it and any new cases that come in."

She looked at him when he stared at her blankly. "We can treat them now, Stephen. We can formulate a cure."

Then added, "Someone did this on purpose, but then we suspected that, but now we know for sure, Stephen, there was no way this occurred naturally in nature. Now, all we have to do is find out who, how and why."

"Oh, you mean the easy part," he gave her a tired grin of his own.

xxxXXXxxx

"Mrs. Ferguson?"

Miles knocked for the third time, harder. The rain was pelting him even under the small porch awning and he was cold through to his bones. Hadn't Eva said the old woman was a recluse who hadn't left the house in forty years? Then where was she? Or was she just a heavy sleeper who had given up waiting for him to get there? With his luck, she'd be sleeping with a merry fire roasting away in the fireplace, warming the entire small house while he was standing in the rain in the dark banging on a door that wasn't going to be answered.

That was when he got uneasy about the whole thing. She'd called, said it was important enough to drag him all the way out here to the middle of nothing and she wasn't answering the door? Just as the thought hit him, a howl that Arthur Conan Doyle must have used for inspiration rose up from inside the house, mournful, intense, urgent. He tried the doorknob and it turned easily in his hand.

"Mrs. Ferguson?" he repeated as he pushed the door open slowly, hoping that she didn't sleep with a shotgun by her side.

Still no answer.

He stepped inside, reached blindly for a light switch, found it, tripped it... nothing. Darkness inside and out. Like everyone else in the world, he somehow believed that the light switch was lying to him and flipped it again, three times. Still no light.

Moving deeper into the dark house, he nearly tripped over a fat tomcat who looked insulted, then scurried away under a table.

"Okay," he thought, "here's where the monster jumps out from behind the furniture and eats you alive, Miles, you idiot."

But no monsters, only a hound, ears all but obscuring its face, mournful notes coming from deep within its throat, the rain playing an eerie accompaniment in the far background, standing over a dark heap on the floor by the dining room table. Miles knelt by the heap, recognized it as an elderly woman a heartbeat before he recognized it as a murder victim.

Elmira Ferguson, 70 years old, who had never harmed anyone in her life, was sprawled on her back with an obscene grin of blood and gore across her neck where someone had taken a knife and ended her long life.

He had only a second to realize that the hairs on the back of the neck really do rise up, before it occurred to him to try the phone, which of course was dead. His cell wasn't any help either, no service in the area. He wondered if the killer was still around, if he knew that there was no cell service and if he was looking for another notch this night. He gave the distraught hound a pat on the head, said, "I'll get someone here for you and the cats, I promise," then with the feeling that eyes were pasted all over his body, he made it to the front door without incident.

By the time he'd made it to his car without anything happening except more rain, he was starting to think that the killer had moved on. He started to open the car door when he noticed it, front and rear... he walked around to the other side... all four tires on the car were slashed. Fear was like a bare wire touched with both hands, sizzling through him with a jolt of current. He considered for a half a second getting inside the car and locking the doors and instantly dismissed that as stupid idea number one. He'd only succeed in trapped himself. A weapon, any kind of weapon?

Digging his keys out of his pocket, he started for the trunk and the tire iron stashed there when he felt the sting and his right leg went out from under him. He found himself on his knees in mud, rain slanting down on his head, a useless set of keys in his hand and blood pouring out of a wound in his thigh, dazed, uncertain right away what had happened to him.

By the time he realized that he'd been shot in the leg, fight or flight had kicked in and since someone was shooting at him and he had nothing at all to defend himself with and one bullet hole already in his body, flight won. Jerking to his feet, he made a hobbling sprint for the treeline, hoping the darkness and rain would obscure the shooter's view.


	7. Chapter 7

1"Son of a bitch," Frank snarled as they both ducked down off the porch and sought cover. "Where did that come from? Did you get a direction, Stephen?"

"West," Stephen barked, his voice carrying over the rain. Water streamed in his eyes and he brushed it away with a flick of one hand. Lightning strobed through the yard again, followed by the crack and spittle of electricity, then the rumble of thunder.

The momentary light gave Frank just enough visibility. "We're not going anywhere in the car, Stephen," he called.

"What?"

"Tires slashed, just like Miles' car. I saw it in the last flash."

Stephen bit off a curse, wishing he'd come for a firefight rather than to find Miles caring for an old lady with too many cats. "I'm unarmed. You got something in the car?"

"Got it in my hand," Frank said, pitching his voice lower. "Was a Boy Scout, remember?"

"There goes my merit badge. Let me try to draw him out, you get behind him."

"You got a death wish?"

"You got a better plan?"

Silence for a moment, punctuated by rolling, grumbling thunder and the drum of rain. "You draw him out, I'll get behind him," Frank finally said.

"Good plan," Stephen agreed wryly.

xxxXXXxxx

"Dr. Durant."

Natalie looked up to see the young investigative epidemiologist she'd been working with for the past three days. She couldn't remember his name. She wondered if he was as tired as she was.

"Yes?" she said without moving out of the bedside chair. She could see Eva straighten up in the bed in her peripheral vision.

"If I could speak to you out here?" the man said uncertainly.

"It's all right, she has clearance."

The young man shrugged. "Okay. We found how it was administered. Now that we knew what we were looking for, it was almost embarrassingly easy. The source was the local restaurant/bar. It was inserted into certain foods and only certain ones, not even all samples of the same food. As if he didn't want a mass contagion, but a controlled case where NIH would be called in but the area wouldn't be considered a national threat to safety."

Eva turned an alarmed face toward Natalie. "What happened at the Ferguson house, Nat? They should have called by now."

"I'll get someone out there," Natalie said. "In fact, I'll go with them. You stay right where you are," she added when she saw the tension bow through Eva's entire body.

"But–"

"You'd only get in the way, Eva, and you're not well enough to go traipsing out in this kind of weather. If anything's wrong, do you want me to have to worry about you too?" It was a dirty trick but Natalie knew it would be an effective one.

Eva sagged back into the sheets. "No," she admitted. "But let me know as soon..."

"As soon," Natalie agreed with a smile.

xxxXXXxxx

They didn't have to leave the yard. They didn't even have to leave the porch.

Lightning struck as if on command, backlighting two figures now in the center of the yard.

A bearded man, long hair stringing down in soaked tendrils around his face, held Miles in front of himself, a perfect barrier between them. Miles sagged in his rough embrace, his head lolling forward, his eyes half closed.

"Don't recognize me, do you, Stephen? Frank?" The man shuffled his hold on Miles as the young man started to sink deeper into his arms, losing the fight to stay conscious. "Oh, no, Miles," he chided, jerking him upright, "come on, you don't want to miss this. Don't you want to see Stephen finally get what's coming to him? He can't be easy to work for. I remember him too well. What's it been like, huh? A kid like you... he'd eat you alive.

"Right, Stephen? Isn't that your managing technique? Take 'em young and soft and harden the hell out of them. Well, it hasn't worked on this one." He laughed, shifted his grasp on Miles, the arm around his neck tightening, the gun muzzle probing deeper into his throat.

"All it took was an old lady in distress and here he was, like that proverbial lamb to the slaughter. You never would have fallen for that one, would you, Frank? You would have noticed something wrong right away." He leaned in close to Miles, his lips to his ear. "See, that's training."

The gun moved away from Miles, arced toward Frank. "And Stephen is good at that. Good at knowing when to leave people behind when they become liabilities. Aren't you, Stephen. You just became a liability, kid. Wanna see if he leaves you behind?"

"Tom Bennett," Stephen finally said.

"You gotta be kidding me," Frank muttered.

"I don't kid, Frank, " Bennett said, "you should remember that much about me. "No sense of humor."

"Let him go, Tom," Stephen suggested, knowing it was useless. "Let him go and let's talk, you and me and Frank. Like it used to be."

"Oh, good line, Stephen," Bennett laughed harshly, "just like in the movies! Let him go. Take me instead. All you're missing is your white hat and rearing steed."

Miles slumped in his arms, his eyes drooping shut, blood loss taking its toll. At this rate it was going to become difficult to hold his hostage and carry out his plans, he thought. Inconvenient.

The kid was becoming more of a liability than an asset, but he could hardly dump him and take his chances. Frank was no doubt armed. He knew that without any question. Frank didn't go anywhere without some kind of protection. Dump the kid and he was just asking for a bullet through the forehead. So it was juggle his uncooperative burden and talk or just blow Stephen and Frank away where they stood.

But where was the satisfaction in that?

Sure, that's where the bad guy showed his Achilles' heel every time. Talking instead of shooting at the big showdown. But they had to know why they were going to die or there was just no sense in it. No reason for the victims he'd already taken. Not that he was going to lose any sleep over any lives he'd taken; it was just that there were rules in life and he was a man who went by the rules. He always had. It might get him killed here on this storm ridden night, but then there was always a price and what did he have to live for anyway?

And if Frank took him down, he'd put a bullet in the kid's brain on his way to the ground. He'd have that satisfaction anyway. They could watch the young doctor's brains splatter out in the rain. Nice image. He liked it.

"You left us," he said, finally.

"We had orders," Stephen said and heard how inane and weak his own words were, how pitifully they carried out over the storm.

A flash of lightning strobed across the small clearing, flaring across Bennett's features, giving him a demon's mask. Thunder cracked like a rifle shot instantly afterward.

Miles winced and sagged deeper into the big man's arms, his leg totally numb and useless beneath him. Blood from a cut on his forehead sluiced over his face, diluted by rain, rendering him all but blind. He thought for a moment that he was imagining that Stephen and Frank were there, hallucinating, but the gun at his temple was all too real, its muzzle jammed into his temple. I don't want to die, he thought.

"Screw your orders!" Bennett shouted over the rain, suddenly bringing the gun around to aim at Stephen.

"They told us you were out, Tom!" Frank yelled, trying to draw the man's attention to himself. "We were told you got out. We had no reason to go back."

"Liar!"

"He's telling the truth!" Stephen insisted as the gun arced from Frank to him. It was hopeless, useless, and he knew it. Tom Bennett had been an unreasonable man when he was young. After carrying years of hatred and now murder, he would only be worse. He was going to kill them all.

And then suddenly Bennett howled and it took Stephen a half second to realize that Miles had stomped backward on the man's instep with every ounce of strength the young man possessed. Bennett lost his grip and Miles fell like a stone to lie unmoving in the muddy grass.

"Drop it!" Frank yelled, knowing he was going to have to shoot.

Bennett swung on him. There was a leering smile on the man's face when Frank's' bullet took him in the center of his forehead.

(To Be Continued)


	8. Red Herring, Part Eight, the Conclusion

1xxxXXXxxx

His uniform fit... for the most part. At least his wife said he cut a dashing figure in it. But then Frank figured she was his wife, she was being loyal. But it was funny. It almost felt good to be wearing the damn thing again.

She had offered to come but he didn't think she should. Somehow it should be just... them. He was even unsure about Miles coming, but then the kid had almost died in the whole fiasco; he'd earned his ticket.

Frank pushed him in the wheelchair across the muddy ground, Natalie walking beside them in her heels, practically having to walk on her tiptoes to keep from sinking in. The wheelchair had been Natalie's stipulation. That or Miles stayed home. So Frank, resplendent in his military finery, was maneuvering it across the still soggy ground while Nat kept her doctor's eye on her patient in spite of his objections that he was fine and he could use crutches. One patented glare from her silenced his arguments.

Stephen and Eva were already at the gravesite, Eva suitably attired in black. Stephen, like Frank, was fitted back into his military uniform, though his wasn't quite so accommodating as Frank's. It seemed that Stephen had put on a few more pounds than Frank had since their service days. No one pointed that out.

They were the only ones there at Tom Bennett's funeral.

It was a short service. Proper military procedures without any trimmings.

Schizophrenia had been the diagnosis. A waste of a brilliant mind. A shambles of a decent career. But at least he was laid to rest with the men he'd served with. That much Stephen had managed to arrange.

Not an easy task considering the man was a murderer.

Not all the team agreed. Or understood.

Stephen didn't care. Nor did he consult them.

It was his call.

And he made it.

For better or worse.

The air was heavy with rain clouds scooting over the horizon as the bagpipes began their plaintive version of "Amazing Grace."


End file.
